Google Street View goes underground at LHC

A virtual tour of the Large Hadron Collider and the ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE experiments is now available on Google Street View. Photo: Google

Visitors all over the world can now explore CERN's massive detectors and 1,200 meters of the Large Hadron Collider tunnel with Google Street View — a Google product that links a series of panoramic photos into a virtual tour.

In 2011, members of Google's Zurich team joined forces with CERN and spent two full weeks photographing the subterranean experiments and portions of the LHC, as well as the interiors of surface buildings at the laboratory. Compiling the imagery and coordinating the GPS locations took an additional two years, according to CERN photographer Max Brice.

"Every 3 meters, they took a six-sided panorama of the tunnel," Brice says. "Then we had to figure out the coordinates of every image. It came out to 6,000 points for us to track."

Walking the line

A red-legged partridge takes in the scenery along the Fermilab bike path. This partridge is not native to the United States, so it is likely among those that were released on site by the state of Illinois. It also may have escaped captivity. Photo: Sarah Witman, DO

In the News

After the Nobel, what's next for particle physics? Supersymmetry!

From NBC News, Oct. 8, 2013

Awarding the Nobel Prize for physics to the scientists who kicked off a quest to find a theoretical subatomic particle brings the nearly 50-year story full circle — like the circular tunnel of the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider, where the elusive Higgs boson was finally detected. But it's not the end of the story.

"It's important to realize that this doesn't close the book," said Don Lincoln, a physicist at Fermilab who is also a member of the Large Hadron Collider's CMS experimental group. "There are still chapters to read."

Physics professor explains why other scientists involved on the Higgs boson didn't get a Nobel

From Business Insider, Oct. 9, 2013

On Tuesday, Peter Higgs, of the United Kingdom, and François Englert, of Belgium, were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for theorizing how particles obtain mass in separate papers published in 1964.

Englert, 80, and his colleague Robert Brout, who died in 2011, were actually first to describe the invisible field, now known as the Higgs field, that pervades all of space and slows particles down, in turn, giving them mass.

Higgs' paper came along several weeks later, although it was the first to predict the existence of a new particle that exists within the invisible field. This became known as the Higgs boson.

Three other theoretical physicists — Carl Hagen, Gerald Guralnik, and Tom Kibble — also published a paper in 1964 about how some elementary particles get their mass. All three are still alive, and therefore eligible for the Nobel, but none of them were recognized for their work.

The Royal Swedish Academy, which selects the Nobel Prize winners, says that a maximum of three living people can split the prize. No exceptions. It would be impossible to recognize Hagen, Guralnik, and Kibble without bending the rules.

Higgs boson work leads to one Nobel Prize. Could there be another?

The 2013 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to two physicists, Francois Englert and Peter Higgs, who independently proposed the mechanism that gives subatomic particles their mass.

Without this mechanism, physicists say, subatomic particles would ping around the universe at the speed of light without interacting and forming atoms and molecules, the building-blocks of matter.

In announcing the award on Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Drs. Englert and Higgs for their work on what has become known as the Brout-Englert-Higgs field and its related particle, the Higgs boson.

We can all tell that a lump of coal, a steel ball bearing and a lead brick are very different from one another, just by using our eyes. On the other hand, we know they are all just made up of different numbers of protons and neutrons in their nuclei, their inner cores.

At MINERvA, we used neutrinos to see these materials, and sure enough, the protons and neutrons seem to know if they are inside coal, steel or lead. The surprise is that these "nuclear effects" are different from what you would predict from measurements using electrons to see those nuclei.

Brian Tice from Rutgers University will present the latest MINERvA measurements in a talk titled "Inclusive Neutrino Cross Section Ratios on Different Nuclei" at the Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar today at 4 p.m. in One West.

Earlier this year, members of the directorate presented Fermilab employees with awards for 20 years of service to the laboratory.
Fermilab Today congratulates the employees.

In the News

Cash-challenged CERN lifted by Nobel hunts for BRIC funds

From Bloomberg Businessweek, Oct. 9, 2013

The Geneva research center that made the most important find in particle physics in half a century, helping explain how the visible universe holds together, is tapping developing nations to help fund its follow-up act.

CERN's observation of a Higgs boson last year led to a Nobel Prize in physics yesterday for Peter Higgs and Francois Englert for their theoretical work predicting the particle's existence. CERN is now considering new multibillion-dollar projects that may prove that other dimensions exist and track what happened after the Big Bang formed our universe.

"It took us 50 years to complete our description of the visible world," CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer said at a press conference yesterday. "It's high time to go into the dark universe. To open that window would be just great."